Toxsyl wrote:I never take forums seriously so I won't really help with that. However I will admit Other M is a really fun game and I enjoy playing it. Despite having Alan Rickman as the voice of Samus.

I finally finished Other M (it was released at a bad time for me). So, before I read other impressions, here are mine. I was planning to do good and bad sections, but the good and bad are too closely linked for that to work.

Technical: Overall I thought the controls and gameplay worked very well in most cases. I didn't think those sorts of simple controls would work well in a 3D-environment, but they did. I think the game was bad at aiming at enemies above and below Samus (which made the final real battle in the first run-through unnecessarily difficult), and it apparently only targeted enemies when they got within a certain distance of Samus, but as long as enemies were in the same plane and reasonably close to Samus she did a good job targeting them and prioritizing targets based on range.

Jumping also was handled well, the platform detection was good enough that jumping between platforms was rarely overly difficult. I really liked that Samus would climb over fairly large obstacles as she went, it is really quite annoying when games make 3-inch tall slope will stop someone dead in his or her tracks. However, I don't think the collision detection with the environment was that good. It was often unclear where you could walk and where you couldn't, and which obstacles in the environment would have collision detection fit close to their shape or just be an invisible wall.

I thought the graphics were high-quality, with nice glow, transparency, and shadow effects. Loading times were a bit of a problem, the game seemed to have hard-coded areas to load, rather than pre-loading all the connected rooms. There were areas where I could reliably trigger a length reloading by leaving a room, waiting a few seconds, then trying to go back into the room.

Gameplay: as I mentioned in the last section, I thought overall gameplay was very good. There was a good variety of enemies with different levels of strength, different attacks, varying levels of A.I., and wildly varying appearance and behavior. The new enemies were sufficiently original to fit well in a Metroid game, while still have plenty of classic enemies with classic behavior that was translated well into a 3D-environment. The aiming was good enough that you could reliably hit enemies even at decent ranges, but enemies would come at you from all directions and various hiding places which kept the difficult level up even with weak enemies. Going back to areas you had already been to and fighting old enemies became much easier, making item-hunting rewarding.

Some of the enemies were a bit too heavily based on Earth creatures for my tastelike asborean, ghalmanian, rhedogian, and griptian), they were cool-looking but just didn't feel as original as the other enemies. I think their appearance could have been changed in fairly minor ways to make them much more original.

I think the game did an excellent job with item-hunting. Items were hidden in a wide variety of areas and required a lot of interesting and original methods to access them. Backtracking was made very tolerable by constantly making new items accessible, and the game was quite clever with sticking items in plane sight but in areas you could not get to in order to make you want to come back. I was worried about how the map showed items, but thanks to hidden passageways and the heavy use of vertical passages you still needed brains and effort to find them. From the map it was even unclear what actual room the item was in, due to some rooms continuing above or below other rooms.

I think the overburst was a bit overused while the finishing moves were underused. Many enemies, at least initially, pretty much always needed overbursts to kill. By the time an enemy is read for a finishing move it is usually almost dead anyway, and they usually don't stay down long enough to get to them if you are fighting at any sort of range, so there isn't much benefit to it. I would have liked it a bit better if they were more likely to trip and fall or get knocked over or something so there were more opportunities for finishing moves. I also would have liked it if, when using a finishing move, Samus would throw one enemy at another.

As I have heard people mention, the over-the-shoulder and forced first-person areas were not good. The first-person sections would not have been so bad if there had been better cues about what you were looking for. I easily spent 10 minutes each searching for little bird's husk and the zeros since I didn't know what I was supposed to be aiming at and there were no real cues in the environment. And there was no point at all to the over-the-shoulder scenes (besides that one bathroom one). Both the first-person and over-the-shoulder scenes were good, but they should have been scripted, the user should not have been in control. The bathroom scenes should just have been normal environments.

Of course I thought the no-warning instant-death situations were unnecessary. Instant-death goes completely against the very core of Metroid gameplay. But further, I think those situations would have been a lot cooler with a scripted slow-motion cut scenes, like Samus dropping down a level and pressing her back up against the wall as the elevator dropped past, or jumping on the face of the giant fish and using that as a platform to jump across the gap.

I don't like that enemies did not drop any items. This makes you overly-dependent on navigation rooms and concentration to refill your items. Regular item drops would also have meant navigation rooms could have been further apart. On top of that, battles like the kihunter king and phantoom could have been made much more difficult if players could refill items by killing some of the constantly-spawning enemies.

The game was far too linear, it was just a case of "go from navigation room A to navigation room B". There were only a couple areas where you could diverge, taking more than one path to the same navigation room. The game world was well-structured for non-linear exploration, with lots of interconnections between areas, it just wasn't utilized in the game at all.

There was also a lack of original weapons in the game. Really only 2 come to mind, the charge beam dispersion and the multi-missile (the latter of which was pretty much useless by the time you got it since the plasma beam tended to be more effective).

I also think forcing you to go into first-person for missiles and super missiles was a huge mistake. Certainly supporting the first-person view was a great idea, but making you stop and aim in the middle of battle made battles much more difficult than they needed to be,

I was a bit disappointed initially at how you got only one missile and, usually, 1/4 of an energy tank with each upgrade, but given the difficulty I think that turned out to be a good number. The game was well-balanced in terms of difficult this way.

Plot: I didn't mind the plot as much as others. Compared to other Metroid games it seemed pretty good. The problem I had was not so much with the plot, it was with Samus's behavior. I think that if she had been confident and aggressive it would have been much better. First, it would make her behavior feel much more in line with how she fought (she acted mopey and unmotivated but fought like a badass, it just didn't fit). Further, I think the situations where she really did have serious problems, like meeting Ridley, Adam's death, and the memory of the incident on the shuttle, would actually have been really moving and important scenes. With Samus acting as she did in the game, those scenes were just continuations of her behavior up to that point and really didn't mean a lot. On the other hand if they came out of left field, if Samus had been headstrong and aggressive then suddenly broke down when faced with something Ridely or her father figure's death, those scenes could have been really moving and had a much larger impact on the players. So by making her moody and emotional throughout the game, they made the moments when she really had to be emotional much less impactful.

Man is the lowest-cost, 150-pound, nonlinear, all-purpose computer system which can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.-NASA in 1965

TheBlackCat wrote:I also think forcing you to go into first-person for missiles and super missiles was a huge mistake. Certainly supporting the first-person view was a great idea, but making you stop and aim in the middle of battle made battles much more difficult than they needed to be,

I think the game would have been way more fun if we would have been allowed to shoot missiles in 3rd person, AND 1st person. For example: they could have made it so 3rd person missiles don't have lock-on, and 1st person missiles do. You would have a higher chance to miss an enemy (that's smart enough to dodge) while shooting from 3rd person or something along those lines. Other than destroying the Reo nests and shit like that, they just didn't give enough of an incentive to go into 1st person and keep that task fresh and fun. The only time I got really excited and on edge was when I was fighting those Desbrakians (Death Bulk) and Phantoon.

Infinity's End wrote:Fighting the Rhedogian was just a pain in the ass.

Yeah, Agreed. Especially on hard mode, I died atleast 10+ times because of the Zebesians, they kick you, like what the hell is that shit? You can't jump on them, but they can kick you and take 60+ damage. Pure. Bullshit.

Infinity's End wrote:The only time I got really excited and on edge was when I was fighting ... and Phantoon.

That is a mistake. He behaves the same way as in Super, which means using super missiles on him is a very bad idea. And by that time charge shots are about the same as missiles, so spamming him with those is better since you can dodge those pesky eyeball fireballs

The desbraskians were particularly bad with the first-person view, because if you didn't kill them right off the bat with a series of super missiles you were toast. They were too fast for your slow first person turning speed to keep up with, and you would lose your super missile charge if they hurt you. If you were in 3rd person you could dodge while charging your missiles making it more of a real battle. Instead you had to finish them off before they had a chance to move. I think those battles would have been a lot more fun if you could drag it out and have some actual back-and-forth with them

Infinity's End wrote:Fighting the Rhedogian was just a pain in the ass.

I agree, although that was more a problem with him being able to dodge just about anything at point-blank range.

Man is the lowest-cost, 150-pound, nonlinear, all-purpose computer system which can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.-NASA in 1965

I know others have said these things as well but Imma do it anyhow.I loved how the gravity suit was a violet forcefield rather than making her freaking suit purple. I always hated that in the other games. The orange is her iconic look.Wall transparency = win. I can't remember how many times I got killed by a bad camera angle in Super Mario 64.Steadilly upgrading beams = good.

The Gravity Suit thing didn't bother me that much. Still, I liked that you finally got to clear the game in Varia Suit design. Not that I hate the other suits, like Okay, there might have been other games where you can get to the end by varia suit, or a way to clear without the gravity suit.I haven't done every single thing on all the games